Books and Readers in Early Modern England

Books and Readers in Early Modern England examines readers, reading, and publication practices from the Renaissance to the Restoration. The essays draw on an array of documentary evidence—from library catalogs, prefaces, title pages and dedications, marginalia, commonplace books, and letters to ink, paper, and bindings—to explore individual reading habits and experiences in a period of religious dissent, political instability, and cultural transformation.

Chapters in the volume cover oral, scribal, and print cultures, examining the emergence of the "public spheres" of reading practices. Contributors, who include Christopher Grose, Ann Hughes, David Scott Kastan, Kathleen Lynch, William Sherman, and Peter Stallybrass, investigate interactions among publishers, texts, authors, and audience. They discuss the continuity of the written word and habits of mind in the world of print, the formation and differentiation of readerships, and the increasing influence of public opinion. The work demonstrates that early modern publications appeared in a wide variety of forms—from periodical literature to polemical pamphlets—and reflected the radical transformations occurring at the time in the dissemination of knowledge through the written word. These forms were far more ephemeral, and far more widely available, than modern stereotypes of writing from this period suggest.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Current Trends in the History of Reading

These quotations from Ben Jonson and John Milton epitomize the two main
ways in which we think of books—as material objects and as systems. Jonson's
pun on "sheets" turns on the fact that early modern paper was made of cloth.
Paper is the topic...

I. Social Contexts for Writing

Chapter 1: Plays into Print: Shakespeare to His Earliest Readers

As is well known, Shakespeare, at least in his role as playwright, had no interest
in the printed book or in its potential readers. Performance was the only form
of publication he sought for his plays. He made no effort to have them published
and none to stop the publication...

Chapter 2: Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible

Contemporary pronouncements about the death of the book are puzzling, for
in many ways, it is the book form—the combination of the ability to scroll with
the capacity for random access, enabling you to leap from place to place—that
has provided the model which these other cultural...

Chapter 3: Theatrum Libri: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and the Failure of Encyclopedic Form

The beguiling manners of Burton's Democritus Junior make it easy to suppose
that the Anatomy of Melancholy performs more or less what it promises in its
dauntingly preemptive Ramistic chart, supplemented by an index or "Table"
beginning in the second edition...

The phenomenon of cat baptism, associated with sectaries in the London of
mid-1640s, can be illustrated from two very different sources. Surviving Middlesex
quarter sessions records reveal that in August 1644 John Platt, a Golding
Lane heel maker, and his wife...

II. Traces of Reading: Margins, Libraries, Prefaces, and Bindings

Chapter 5: What Did Renaissance Readers Write in Their Books?

Roger Stoddard has recently reminded us that "When we handle books sensitively,
observing them closely so as to learn as much as we can from them, we
discover a thousand little mysteries. . . . In and around, beneath and across
them we may find...

Chapter 6: The Countess of Bridgewater's London Library

A recent survey of early modern women's reading follows earlier scholarship in
assuming that "few women developed libraries of their own."1 As a challenge
to this widely held belief, this essay presents a case study of the London library
of Frances (Stanley) Egerton, Countess...

Chapter 7: Lego Ego: Reading Seventeenth-Century Books of Epigrams

Epigrammatists routinely refer to their own labor as writers, including the
work of revising their poems, and for reasons that will soon become clearer, I
start by invoking and participating in that tradition.
As I researched...

Chapter 8: Devotion Bound: A Social History of The Temple

Bookbinding is the final stage in a mechanical process of reproduction, but in
early modern Europe it must also be understood as the first act of reception.
For a customer had a say, at least potentially, about several important aspects of
the binding, including the materials...

III. Print, Publishing, and Public Opinion

In 1641, England experienced a culture shock—an explosion of small cheap
books and broadsides reporting, commenting upon, and manipulating public
events. That pamphlet culture waxed and waned until the Restoration, by
turns more and less...

Historians and literary scholars of seventeenth-century England have argued
in recent years that if the political upheaval which occurred there midway
through that century revolutionized nothing else, it revolutionized reading.1
Most seventeenth-century contemporaries...

As English citizens weary of sectarian battles welcomed their restored monarch
in a groundswell of public concord, some might reasonably have hoped
that the impulse toward national unity would help to settle long-standing
disputes over liberty of...

Chapter 12: John Dryden's Angry Readers

When we consider John Dryden's achievement today, it is rightly as the Restoration
writer who most completely defines his age. A narrative of his ascent to
national prominence would point first to his appointments as poet laureate in
1668 and as historiographer...

Afterword: Records of Culture

The revolution in modern bibliographical studies has in large measure been
effected through a willingness to notice what had been unnoticeable, to find
evidence in the hitherto irrelevant; so that, for example, habits of reading,
marginalia, and traces of ownership...

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